1978 ‘Les Rendez-vous d'Anna’ Directed by Chantal Akerman
Anna is a film director whose job takes her all over western Europe. In each place she either already has some intimate connection, or readily makes one. People seem drawn to her, but inevitably insist on sharing their inmost secrets and discontents with her, despite her obvious and profound lack of interest in these revelations. This does not deter Anna from continuing to meet people, and she genuinely connects with them occasionally, as when she sees her mother briefly in Brussels.
It's been about an hour since the final voice message played and this film closed and I sit here absolutely floored by the power of Chantal Akerman's cinema. Her work specifically in the 70s has become something of great importance to me personally. Her films in this period are formally rigorous, pushing the form into areas that I'm not sure had been approached yet and it's a shame that nobody remembers her for anything other than Jeanne Dielman.
Les Rendez-vous d’Anna is a deeply personal kind of autobiographical tale. Anna moves through cities showing her films having short encounters with strangers, friends and family and each scene is filled with a kind of unknowing sadness that seeps through. Anna is…
In New Orleans, everything is demarcated temporally as "before the storm" or "after the storm." The entire world is shaped and colored by Hurricane Katrina and the federal floods, and it comes up in unexpected ways, from casual references used to indicate when something happened to significant, simple explanations for why something is the way it is now. It's always there. In The Meetings of Anna, the watershed moment that seems to haunt all of the characters is apparently WWII.
It's there haunting everyone Anna meets, directly or indirectly, from lost loved ones to the economic results of the war. It has, over the 30 years between the end of it and the time of this film, altered countless lives,…
Chantal Akerman almost exclusively works on horizontal planes of space. Her compositions are known for their flat, minimalist staging, and she usually cuts with perpendicular angles to emphasize each shot's flatness. So one of the many surprising shots in Les Rendez-Vous d'Anna comes early. Anna leaves her hotel in Germany, and the camera tracks alongside her in a horizontal dolly. Suddenly, a flash of vertical motion interrupts the frame. It's a female maid, almost nonchalantly in the background, waving a sheet as she makes the bed. Another few moments later, another maid appears in the depth of the frame, also working. Akerman then cuts to a perpendicular frame, as Anna continues to walk down the hallway, and three more maids…
Les rendez-vous d'Anna is a formal curiosity first and a character piece second.
Revolving around a female film director traveling to the location of her newest film's screening, the film's premise carries the expectation of glamour, colorful characterizations and perhaps a cinema-based narrative. However, Chantal Akerman offers none of these things, actively avoiding what is normally seen in stories like this and radically shifting storytelling conventions. There are no sparkling movie stars working the room and the actual screening is never shown. Instead, the bulk of the film concerns itself with mundane activities and static action- lonely evenings in hotel rooms and lengthy train rides.
Anna, our protagonist, has five meetings throughout her trip. There's a sexual encounter with a…
The purity of cinema looking out windows walking down streets fills my heart, for love of Chantal.
[66/100]
I'm not very knowledgable about slow cinema, and in different movies I've seen I will often find myself irritated by static shots that seem to go on without any real purpose. I think Akerman struck just the right balance in Les Rendez-vous d'Anna; she finds a way to use these longer takes to express some observation about the world. In images of the everyday, Akerman discovers little mysteries (as in the opening arrival of the train), poetic and rhythmic patterns (the maids fluttering the sheets in successive hotel suites), and studies of tasks and skills (the changing over of the train car). At the same time, though, the movie doesn't capture realism so much as a sort of artful…
FLICK FOUR OF WEEK OF CHANTAL
From what I've seen so far, Les Rendezvous D'Anna is easily Chantal Akerman's best looking film yet and her most personal. It's clearly semi-autobiograhical. Anna is a filmmaker, Chantal was a filmmaker. Anna is a (somewhat closeted) lesbian, Chantal was a(n outspoken) lesbian. Anna's parents are business owners, Chantal's parents were business owners. Anna has a tight relationship with her mother, Chantal had a tight relationship with her mother. Anna is blatantly a fictionalized version of Chantal's self. And I related to her in a lot of ways.
Throughout Les Rendezvous D'Anna, while traveling around Europe promoting a new film, she comes across family and friends and strangers, all of who spill their guts…
I didn't have time to watch this in one sitting, so I'll need to re watch because it's what something like this deserves. I love that Akerman's ultimate fantasy is to have people spill their guts to her.
Far more narratively driven than some of Chantal Akerman's other character pieces, but in an incredibly organic way. The subtle nature of Akerman's visuals are used to incredible effect as we watch film director Anna encounter several different people as she journey's home to Paris. Very strong autobiographic influence, but it wouldn't be a Chantal Akerman film if there weren't.
Very similar to Jeanne Dielman in that the story centers around a woman mechincally going through the motions of her mundane life. Anna is a filmmaker traveling across Europe showing her new movie. Along the way she talks with fellow travelers and acquaintances, mostly lackluster excuses for men. Where Akerman kept the camera locked in place for each scene in Jeanne Dielman, as if the frame itself a prison for the protagonist's life, we move freely with Anna throughout this film. Occasionally similar methods are employed, say, when she stops at a diner for a conversation or sits staring off in her hotel room. In these long, slow scenes Akerman finds perfect symmetry, dividing rooms and tables between characters for…
Virtually the formal opposite of Resnais + switching back to Akerman’s style was jarring + tough. Dreyer to Resnais at least imports a similar weight to poetic eloquence, though the resemblance most likely stops there.
Akerman, by contrast, films repression as one may (un)consciously experience it: cold, stilted, symmetric (perhaps the 1.33 ratio would have better served her). Words are hardly exchanged, and a single glance or gesture carries apocalyptic reverberations. Interestingly enough, this film does an arguably "better" job than "Jeanne Dielman" of synthesizing Akerman's body of work: her rigid formal style, the aura of autobiography seeping into the narrative, the themes + stories that interest her (motherhood, filmmaking, domesticity, homosexuality).
”Anna, where are you?”
This turned out a vv interesting viewing! Here’s how it went:
1. I haven’t been so keen on the Akermans I’ve seen beyond Jeanne Dielman. The handful I’ve tried since seeing her 1975 hit have been mostly quite flat and tedious and desperately lacking in Delphine Seyrig.
2. Akerman’s shallow-depth, stagey compositions and Aurore Clément’s very dry performance didn’t bode well for this one early on either.
3. I started to think it was weird that I hadn’t noticed how much she and Robert Bresson had in common, which made me interested to know why I love Bresson and not Akerman. The commonalities relate especially to how they choreograph movement, work with their ‘models’ and how…
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